Abominable Cruelty in the ‘Developed’ World

Just as I’d begun writing this week’s column focusing on the brutal murder of Delhi’s Ankit Saxena—a young man murdered by the parents of the Muslim girl he loved—I realised that we are not the only country where young innocents are hacked in full public view. Of course, different countries adopt their very own special ways of hacking innocence if not innocents.

We, in India, surviving in the midst of communal hatred, are busy killing love and lovers. Even married couples are not spared. The most glaring example is that of Kerala’s Hadiya, whose parents have turned into the killers of her marriage!

In European countries, the state is busy snatching children from their biological parents. One case after another of children forcibly removed from the care of their parents and taken under the state’s so-called protective care!

In fact, this noon just as I’d started writing this column, Delhi’s well-known lawyer-activist manning ‘Save Your Children’, Suranya Aiyar, got in touch, with details of a family of Indian origin (Muslims from Tamil Nadu) whose two children have been forcibly taken away from them, by the state in the UK.

And as I went through the details to this hapless Indian family I sat absolutely shocked. The father, Mohammad Y, mother, Yasmin Saheeta Banu Amakeder, of the two children, have not been allowed to meet their children—Mahroos Ahmad Mohammad Y (born April 10, 2009) and Mahfooza Mohammad Y (born March 26, 2011).

The children were snatched in 2015 and as it gets apparent in the papers the UK courts (in Birmingham) have refused to let these children travel to India or Singapore where they have close relatives who are willing to look after them and take care of them.

This brings me to ask: why should the UK Government ‘murder’ the very childhood of these two children—Mahroos and Mahfooza Mohammad Y? Why can’t these children be sent back to their country to be looked after by their aunts and uncles? Why should these children be sent for adoption in a foreign land, the UK,when they have parents and close relatives? Why shouldn’t we demand an immediate halt to this barbaric trend in the so-called developed countries, where children are snatched from their biological parents and placed here and there, on any given excuse!